Daily Archives: November 11, 2018

Focus is a simple but powerful thing. When you’re in your flow, your creativity takes over, and your work is effortless. When you’re faced with distractions and interruptions, progress is slow and painful. And nowhere is that truer than when writing.

Word has long been the standard for creating professional-quality documents. Technologies like Editor—Word’s AI-powered writing assistant—make it an indispensable tool for the written word. But at some point in the writing process, you’ll need some information you don’t have at your fingertips, even with the best tools. When this happens, you likely do what research tells us many Word users do: leave a placeholder in your document and come back to it later to stay in your flow.

Today, we’re starting to roll out new capabilities to Word that help users create and fill in these placeholders without leaving the flow of their work. For example, type TODO: finish this section or <> and Word recognizes and tracks them as to-dos. When you come back to the document, you’ll see a list of your remaining to-dos, and you can click each one to navigate back to the right spot.

Once you’ve created your to-dos, Word can also help you complete them. If you need help from a friend or coworker, just @mention them within a placeholder. Word sends them a notification with a “deep link” to the relevant place in the document. Soon, they’ll be able to reply to the notification with their contributions, and those contributions will be inserted directly into the document—making it easy to complete the task with an email from any device.

Over time, Office will use AI to help fill in many of these placeholders. In the next few months, Word will use Microsoft Search to suggest content for a to-do like <>. You will be able to pick from the results and insert content from another document with a single click.

These capabilities are available today for Word on the Mac for Office Insiders (Fast) as a preview. We’ll roll these features out to all Office 365 subscribers soon for Word for Windows, the Mac, and the web.

Get started as an Office for Mac Insider

Office Insider for Mac has two speeds: Insider Fast and Insider Slow. To get access to this and other new feature releases, you’ll need a subscription to Office 365. To select a speed, open Microsoft Auto Update and on the Help menu select Check for Updates.

As always, we would love to hear from you, please send us your thoughts at UserVoice or visit us on Twitter or Facebook. You can also let us know how you like the new features by clicking the smiley face icon in the upper-right corner of Word.

Unclassified malware samples from U.S. Cyber Command will be shared with VirusTotal by the Cyber National Mission Force.

VirusTotal aggregates malware and malicious URL data from antivirus products and allows anyone to submit samples for inclusion in the database. The CNMF — the action arm of Cyber Command responsible for planning and directing cyberoperations — said in a short post that it will be sharing unclassified U.S. Cyber Command malware samples “that it believes will have the greatest impact on improving global cybersecurity.”

“VirusTotal is part of Chronicle, Alphabet’s enterprise cybersecurity company. It’s one of the largest malware intelligence services in the world, and supports a global community of security researchers and responders. VirusTotal has always been focused on information sharing as a way of making the security community stronger, and today we have work with multiple groups within the U.S. federal government,” Gillet wrote via email. “We believe strongly in the value of collaboration between the private and public sectors, and were happy to see the announcement that U.S. Cyber Command will be sharing useful information with the broader security community. It will help everyone improve their defenses.”

CNMF made it clear that only unclassified Cyber Command malware samples will be shared, so it is unclear how much will be added to VirusTotal. CNMF has already submitted two Cyber Command malware samples to VirusTotal, both from Russian advanced persistent threat group Fancy Bear, aka Sofacy — the group accused of targeting the International Olympic Committee, attacking the Ukraine military and the DNC hack, among other attacks.

The first Cyber Command malware sample submitted was backdoor software targeting remote security software LoJack and the other was a UEFI rootkit named LoJax.

Jake Williams, founder and president of Rendition Infosec, based in Augusta, Ga., said the initiative to share Cyber Command malware with VirusTotal “has serious potential to disrupt adversary activities.”

“There are millions of samples added to VirusTotal every month. If CNMF flags any of them as interesting, they are likely to get immediate attention by researchers,” Williams said via Twitter direct message. “From an adversary point of view, their malware was already discovered by at least one antivirus, but perhaps nobody was really paying attention to it, classifying it as commodity malware. A bump from CNMF can change that.”

Williams noted this was how the original Duqu dropper malware was brought to the attention of researchers in 2011.

“The Duqu dropper was in Kaspersky’s data set for months before another firm highlighted that it was both malicious and likely nation-state,” Williams said. “Then Kaspersky jumped on it and performed deep dive analysis. I think CNMF can have a similar impact on malware research.”

£550inc fully insured delivery (personally delivered if within 50 miles of GU14 subject to deposit to cover costs)

Razer Chroma keyboard £70

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Am looking for £600 inc courier for both (personally delivered if within 50 miles of GU14 subject to deposit to cover costs) – open to offers within reason.

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Landline telephone number. Make a call to check out the area code and number are correct, too

Name and address including postcode

Valid e-mail address

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Extreme Networks has launched a portfolio of network software that provides automation and a single console for managing the data center and the campus network. The release puts to work technology Extreme acquired in 2017 with the purchase of Brocade’s data center business.

The latest software in the Extreme SLX Agile Data Center portfolio includes the new Workflow Composer and a refresh of the Extreme Management Center (XMC). The Workflow Composer is a proprietary implementation of the open source StackStorm software Extreme acquired from Brocade.

The new technology, introduced this week, is meant to strengthen Extreme’s competitive posture against Arista, Cisco and Juniper Networks, which are also focused on network automation and providing a single application for managing the data center and campus.

Extreme’s decision to make XMC the focal point for administering the company’s data center and campus switches and applications “can potentially deliver operational efficiencies,” said Brad Casemore, an analyst at IDC.

“They’ll take this message initially to their installed base of customers — and that’s where I expect it will resonate most — but they’ll also try to emphasize these synergies in situations where they’re seeking to displace an incumbent vendor,” he said.

Extreme extended XMC’s reach from the campus to its SLX line of data center switches and routers via the Brocade IP fabric, which provides a Layer 3 Clos switching architecture. Network operators use the XMC to manage, troubleshoot and provision switches and wireless LAN access points regardless of the supplier.

Extreme’s SLX 9140 switch as seen through the Extreme Management Center

StackStorm in Workflow Composer

Workflow Composer uses StackStorm to respond to events in network infrastructure and application environments in the data center. Admins define the rules for responding to network occurrences, such as a system failure.

Workflow Composer will run diagnostic checks, remediate problems or send alerts through the various systems it plugs into through its integration pack. A list of supporting technology is on the StackStorm Exchange.

Available applications include monitoring systems, such as Nagios, New Relic and Sensu; the Ansible and Chef open source automation platforms; and messaging software, such as HipChat. A pack is also available for Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure. ACI provides policy-driven, software-based management of a network fabric comprised of Cisco Nexus 9000 switches.

Latest Extreme SLX switch, router

Along with Composer, Extreme unveiled new hardware: the SLX 9030 top-of-rack leaf switch and the SLX 9640 data center interconnect router. The new devices expanded the Brocade-developed SLX line of leaf-spine switches and routers to seven products.

The SLX9640 has 24 ports of dual-mode 1/10 GbE and 12 ports of dual-mode 40/100 GbE. The 1RU hardware provides up to 900 Gbps of switch fabric capacity and up to 4 million and 800,000 IPv4 and IPv6 routes in the Forwarding Information Base.

______________________________________________________This message is automatically inserted in all classifieds forum threads.By replying to this thread you agree to abide by the trading rules detailed here.Please be advised, all buyers and sellers should satisfy themselves that the other party is genuine by providing the following via private conversation to each other after negotiations are complete and prior to dispatching goods and making payment:

Landline telephone number. Make a call to check out the area code and number are correct, too

Name and address including postcode

Valid e-mail address

DO NOT proceed with a deal until you are completely satisfied with all details being correct. It’s in your best interest to check out these details yourself.